Dr. Gerald Pfeifer

Keep me away from the wisdom
which does not cry,
the philosophy
which does not laugh,
and the greatness
which does not bow before children.[Khalil Gibran]

The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.[Aurelius Augustinus]

Professionally I am the Vice President of Products & Technology
Programs at SUSE, responsible for
• the SUSE portfolio including the SUSE Linux Enterprise family
(incl. SAP offerings, High Availability, HPC,...),
Ceph-based SUSE Enterprise Storage,
SUSE OpenStack Cloud, and
management products (SUSE Manager, Customer Center, Studio)
with hundreds of millions of revenue
• pricing strategy
• leading teams of product managers, technical account managers,
and certification, ISV, and CSP engineers, spread globally
• working with a development team of ~700.

Before that I led product management
for the SUSE portfolio at Novell and earlier was project lead for
Enterprise Linux, coordinating dozens of teams in an engineering
organization matrixed all over the world.
In addition I was responsible for specific aspects of the SUSE Linux
platform such as the Itanium version, RAS and scalability, created the
Software Development Kit, and served as release manager.

Most of 2003, I was on a research contract at C.I.E.S./University of
Calabria, working on the
DLV project.
Before that, I spent several years in academia, mostly as assistant
professor at the Database and
Artificial Intelligence Group at Vienna University of Technology.
Apart from research in databases and artificial intelligence (deductive
databases, non-monotonic reasoning, knowledge representation & reasoning)
and teaching, I supervised student projects
and theses and managed the sysadmin team.

Outside of work I contribute to GCC,
where I maintain the web presence and documentation, do the occasional
hack and serve on the Steering Committee,
FreeBSD, where I am a ports
committer,
and openSUSE.
As time permits I also enjoy scuba diving as a certified rescue diver
and seeing places.